Speaking Tiger

The veteran journalist Sandy Gall reported from Afghanistan at length through the 1980s and ’90s, spending months with Massoud and his forces.

Combining immaculate scholarship with extraordinary storytelling, Swapna Liddle has produced an outstanding book of narrative history—on a great city in transition, and on early modern India—that will be read and discussed for decades.

But the controversy also took this remarkably frank and sensitive exploration of love and desire to many thousands of readers. It became, and remains to this day, one of the most celebrated works of contemporary Hindi literature.

Equally, the book is a gloriously witty and provocative examination of middle-class Indian morality; the politics of religion, gender and sexuality in popular culture; and the importance of the song, the item number and the wayward woman in Hindi cinema.